


with the stars and us

by wingsofadreamer



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, like. it's extremely hurt/comfort, mika has a bad dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 03:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17593646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingsofadreamer/pseuds/wingsofadreamer
Summary: As he walked up the steps in a quiet, slow rhythm, he began to hear something peculiar, something familiar, yet something quite wrong.It was the sound of sobbing.





	with the stars and us

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is (sorta) my first official shumika fic!! i hope y'all enjoy also warning for sorta dark imagery in the beginning but its not too bad hopefully

It wasn’t very often that Mika actually got a proper night’s rest. He was usually running around the handicraft club room during the nighttime, helping his mentor clean up when he fell asleep at his desk, or staring up at the ceiling of his room within the vicinity of Shu’s house, letting anxiety cloud his mind with thoughts that kept him awake through a majority of the night. When he was able to relax enough to actually fall asleep, though, he tended to have dreams of differing themes and events. Sometimes he dreamed about normal things, like going shopping with Arashi, or having maintenance done on him by Shu before one of their lives. Sometimes he dreamed about stranger, more imaginative things, like falling into a land full of candies and sweets, or watching a lapis-colored sunset atop a castle of glass.

 

Sometimes, though, he dreamed of the past. The past he wished never existed. The very past that kept him up nearly every night, wishing he’d done something  _ more _ , wishing he’d been a better doll, wishing there were ways to travel back in time to make just one thing right again. But even then, sometimes his heart swung so violently between two different ends, as though he were stuck in a endless game of tug-of-war, and he was left to limply follow along his conflicted heart like a puppet with no will, letting his indecisiveness and emotions take control of his mind.

 

_ If things were the way they had been last year, would he be happy? _

 

It was a question that constantly plagued Mika’s mind at night, and a question he still didn’t know the answer to. But these thoughts that loomed over him like a storm beginning to form didn’t matter now, in the dead of night, when he was sleeping. When he was a simple doll never meant to feel emotions. When the dreaming Mika opened his eyes, he was dressed up in Valkyrie’s old outfit, prim and proper as he had always been, as his mentor had always expected of him. A stage was laid out before him, one of the past. Clockwork adorned the stage, and behind Nazuna and Mika, just above them, stood Shu himself, seemingly a god from the angle of a simple member of the audience.

 

The music started, and the two puppets below Shu began to breathe and dance as though their only purpose was to move under the will of a single king, a single puppetmaster. Their voices, perfectly tuned to Shu’s liking, recorded to ensure only perfection for the performance, and to encase the beauty of their voices within a glass case, forever frozen in the time where everything was perfect, carefully organized by Shu’s magic puppeteer hands. This was the Valkyrie of the past, the Valkyrie that Shu had raised with his own two hands from the dirt and had flown high into the sky so that even his dolls might be able to catch a glimpse of Valhalla.

 

But to Mika, being able to even bask in the glory that was standing on the same stage as Shu Itsuki was better than even the heavenly gates of Valhalla. But of course, this wasn’t the type of dream where Mika could enjoy that kind of luxury.

 

Mika moves perfectly to the rhythm of the song, puppet strings pulled taut around him, constricting his moves so that he’d only be able to dance to the playing melody. But Mika knows what will happen next. He’s relived this moment so many times to the point of memorization. Right on cue, the power in the auditorium shuts off, cutting off the sound and interrupting the perfect artistry Shu had been managing thus far. The puppet strings holding Nazuna and Mika in place abruptly go limp, and Mika is able to freely move his limbs around again. Staying silent in the darkness that had overtaken the stage, the mumbles of the audience are quiet to anyone else, but to Mika they’re deafening.

 

_ How could something so perfect end so quickly like this? _

 

No. The show had to continue, no matter what. No matter what, Mika had to finish what Shu had started. He had to give his everything for the mentor that had saved him from a bitter fate. Mika reached out towards the audience, stepping forward past the mark in which he had been instructed to stand on. And he began to sing, as though he’d been practicing for weeks on end for this exact moment. His voice was so  _ human _ in that moment, so imperfect and nothing to his mentor’s liking.

 

And yet, he had felt so  _ alive _ .

 

And yet… It had been the end, the end of a dream… That all three of them had hoped would be able to stay alive for a little while longer. But that wasn’t what fate had in store for them. The murmuring of the audience grew even louder, and despite the speechless state Shu had been reduced to, Mika could feel the puppet strings begin to tighten again, as though someone were pulling on them again. When he looked up, Nazuna was gone. Shu was gone. There was only the deafening screams and heckles of the audience, almost unbearable for him. He sank to the ground as the puppet strings began to tighten even more.

 

He would never be the doll that Shu had always wanted him to be. He would never be the person Nazuna had seen him as. He’d never be able to do anything properly, and sooner or later, Shu would simply cast him out. He had no use for a doll with such strong emotions that made him so outwardly  _ human _ , after all.

 

The puppet strings pulled Mika’s arms up and inwards. An outer force compelled him to wrap his fingers around his neck, and Mika closed his eyes as he tightened his grip. This was the end of Valkyrie, and there would be no need for him to continue performing on this stage of the past any longer. The audience’s deafening murmurs materialized into the crows that swarmed him, adding onto the suffocating feeling that was slowly beginning to overtake his entire body, until everything stopped all at once, and Mika snapped awake, quickly sitting up and gasping for air.

 

He tried to find a grip on the bedsheets, on his pillow, on  _ anything _ that he could hold onto, but there was nothing. It was hard to breathe when he was practically wheezing, unable to find a proper rhythm in order to bring his breathing back to normal. Eventually, though, his breaths began to slow, and his quickened pulse somewhat calmed down, amber and lapis lazuli eyes wide awake and glistening with fresh tears that had somehow begun to well up in his eyes.

 

Mika, again, found it hard to breathe as he began to heave sobs, his form crumpling on top of itself, tears falling freely from his eyes and staining the blanket he’d wrapped himself in. Once again, the sight was so painfully human that Mika wondered if Shu would ever love him the way Mika loved him. But how could Shu love such a broken and defective doll like him? Mika smiled bitterly and shook his head, burying his face in his hands and continuing to sob, his cries seeming to echo and resound throughout the room. Deep within his heart, he wished that Shu were here to tell him that it would be alright, to hold him and comfort him in that perfect oshi-san way Mika always daydreamed about.

 

But daydreams were daydreams, and there was no room for Mika’s distant dreams and desires to come true in this world. There was only the heartache that continued to resound throughout him like the melodies he’d been instructed to follow perfectly as the dim moonlight shined faintly through his window.

 

…

 

It wasn’t until quite late at night that Shu stepped through the doorway to their house, grumbling as he took off his snow-covered coat and hung it on the coat rack, quietly closing the door and sighing as he sat down on the couch, clearly exhausted from whatever he had been doing in the dead of night. He watched the snow steadily fall from the curtained window of the living room, wondering how scenery so beautiful could create such a cold, wet mess on his coat and his hair. He sighed again, then headed upstairs with the fabrics he’d bought from the store to continue working on one of his new projects. As he walked up the steps in a quiet, slow rhythm, he began to hear something peculiar, something familiar, yet something quite wrong.

 

It was the sound of sobbing.

 

Raising an eyebrow, Shu’s mind immediately thought of Mika, the rhythm of his steps growing more frequent as he rushed over to Mika’s room as silently as he possibly could. When he pressed his ear to the door, the muffled sobbing coming from the other end confirmed his suspicions. He wondered why his heart had tightened up so much upon hearing Mika. For a moment, he considered sending Mademoiselle in to help soothe Mika’s nerves and ask what was wrong, but Shu decided that maybe that was not the best choice of action.

 

Shu always knew what Mika wanted, at any moment and at any time. It was expected, after all, Mika was the broken doll that he’d taken in and put back together to his liking, the pieces of his heart carefully mended by Shu’s expert craftsmanship. Yet… Mika had never been a doll to Shu. Just when he thinks every puppet string around Mika’s limbs have been set in place, he moves so unexpectedly and unpredictably that it is almost impossible to comprehend to the sovereign. 

 

It was true that Mika can never be the doll that Nito was. But… perhaps Shu wanted to find perfection in imperfection. He gently and slowly pushed open the door to Mika’s room. There was his doll, the moonlight dimly illuminating his hunched over form, his face shoved into a pillow, his chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm that makes Shu’s chest tighten once again. Making his way over to the bed, he hesitates to say anything, afraid that his words will fail him again and make Mika feel worse. He considered running into his room to grab Mademoiselle again, but even Mademoiselle didn’t seem to be calling out to him.

 

“Kagehira,” he says gently, sitting on the bed. Mika’s head snaps up and looks at him with an expression of shock, and some panic. Beautiful amber and lapis lazuli eyes were bloodshot, his face and pillow stained with tears, chest rising and falling shakily. “O-Oshi-san, I-I… Yer n-not supposed ta…” Mika shrinks back and buries his face in his pillow again, and Shu breathes in for a moment, holding his breath as though he might be able to stop time to think for just a few more moments.

 

He sighs, choosing to scoot closer to him. “Lift your head.” His words are still quiet, gentle as possible, as though carrying a doll of the most delicate porcelain dressed in beautiful silk. Mika complies, sniffling as he tries his best to compose himself under Shu’s gaze. Shu scoots further onto the bed, placing himself in front of Mika and swiping a thumb across his face, his hand carefully caressing his tearstained cheek as he feels just under his eyelids. “Crying… is unsuitable for a doll, prim and proper. Dolls are unable to feel such emotion,” Shu says.

 

“However… Kagehira, you are… not such a doll.” Shu’s expression is unwavering as he takes note of how warm Mika’s face is.  _ “Perhaps my hands are too cold… I had been outside in that horrendous weather for longer than I had wished to be, after all,”  _ he thinks to himself. He bites his lip, not sure how to handle his next words, wishing he’d brought Mademoiselle in the room with him, but either way, she would have wanted him to reach out to Mika as himself.

 

Shu shook his head. He could not use words for this exchange between him and Mika and ruin the moment, no. There was a simple way to make his unsightly tears vanish, for that stupidly human grin to appear on his face once more, to make his eyes of amber and lapis lazuli shine like jewels once again.

 

Still gentle and precise as ever, Shu pulled Mika into a hug. It was no more than a wordless exchange between the two, and yet Mika understood completely.  _ “As expected, words will not reach his wool-covered ears,”  _ Shu thought to himself as he ran his hand across Mika’s back while Mika slumped his head in the crook in Shu’s shoulder. Shu could feel the tears staining his sweater, and the way Mika trembled under him only prompted him to pull him as close as possible. 

 

His warmth was unlike anything Shu had experienced in a lifetime, though perhaps that was the consequence of being in such close contact with another… Yet the warmth was almost overwhelmingly comfortable to Shu, not painfully hot or suffocatingly tight. It was a perfect embrace, as though he’d been waiting to embrace Mika like this his entire life. He could almost equate it to a distant childhood, even…

 

“Thank ya, Oshi-san… Thank ya, always,” Mika whispers, still a bit sniffly and hoarse, but a clear improvement from how he had been just moments ago. “You do not have to thank me, Kagehira,” Shu remarks quietly as he pulls away to take Mika’s face in his hands and looks at him, his expression losing a bit of the sharpness that he always tried to wear. His long fingers wiped at the remaining tears on Mika’s face. “You have done much for me. It is only proper that I return such a gesture.”

 

It was only then that Mika threw his arms around Shu and embraced him tightly, afraid that if he let go he may never be able to hug him like this again. “Even if I say ‘thank ya’ a million times, I don’t think it’ll be enough t’let ya know how grateful I am for ya.” Mika can very nearly feel Shu’s heartbeat, as well as his own about to burst out of his chest from how close they are to each other. “...It is enough for you to be here,” Shu runs a hand through his painfully messy hair, not minding the sudden embrace that he had been caught in. 

 

“ _ You  _ are enough for me, Kagehira.”

 

No other words could describe how the both of them felt at the moment, holding each other close in the faint moonlight, with only the stars to accompany their lingering thoughts and hopes for the other.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed! i took the title from the ending theme of persona 5 (hoshi to bokura to)
> 
> my twit is @gaiaxylibrary if you'd like to yell at me!!


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